Obama Commits Political Faux Pas, Says Something True

I don't blame Hillary Clinton for trying to take advantage of this opportunity to win over voters by jumping on Obama's recent remarks, but really, is there anyone out there who honestly doesn't think that some Americans are bitter in exactly the way Obama said some Americans are bitter? You're Goddamn right some Americans are bitter, and with good reason, too.

Clinton supporters are handing out "I'm Not Bitter" bumper stickers. Clinton herself is telling people what they want to hear by saying things like, "The people of faith I know don't 'cling' to religion because they're bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich." Actually, Hillary, there are a certain number of people out there who latch on to religion because they're poor or bitter or empty inside, and you damn well know it. But it's a smart thing to say strategically, because it makes it sound as if Obama characterized all religious people as being religious for negative reasons, which of course he didn't.

Yes, this is sound political strategy. It just makes me sad that a statement reflecting an unfortunate truth of today's political climate is apparently too much for some people to handle, that Hillary Clinton, who must know in her heart of hearts that Obama was right, has more to gain by denying this truth than by acknowledging it. As David Cross once said about our current president's tendency to put things in idiotically simplistic and downright false terms, "Are we a nation of six-year-olds? Answer: yes."

(The opinions expressed here are mine alone, certainly not those of Barack Obama or any other Obama supporter, all of whom believe that all Americans are totally optimistic people who harbor no feelings of disappointment or bitterness whatsoever.)

Slam Dunk, Strindberg Style...

(...or "It's Okay, the French Dude Said")

I had a job interview one afternoon last week. The story of that job interview is probably interesting only to me, but what the hell, I'm gonna tell it anyway.

My interview was at 4:00, in San Francisco. I was working at the coffee shop until 2:00. This left me plenty of time to BART across the Bay. No problem.

At a few minutes after 2:00, literally just as I'm about to head down the stairs into the depths of the Downtown Berkeley BART station, my phone starts to vibrate. It's this dude from a staffing agency, the same dude who got me the seasonal position I had from October through January, which paid pretty well by customer service standards and which I'd hoped might become permanent, but didn't. He says he's got a perfect opportunity for me. He thinks there's basically no chance that I won't get this position. He calls it a "slam dunk." He tells me what it pays. It pays a bit more even than the last job.

Great. I'm definitely interested.

I just need you to email me your most recent resume, he says.

Sure thing, I'll do that as soon as I get home this evening.

Yeah, see, that's probably gonna be too late. I really need it immediately. They want this position filled, like, now.

I couldn't believe this was happening. Weeks go by without any significant developments in my job search and now, here I am, with two important things colliding in the same moment. What do I do? Do I go home and send off the resume for this sure thing, this slam dunk, realizing that if I do this I probably won't make the interview in San Francisco in less than two hours? Or do I pass up the slam dunk and stick to this scheduled interview, which came after a few phone interviews and some bizarre online psychological profile survey which somehow did not detect that I'm a total weirdo?

In keeping with my longtime commitment to indecisiveness, I figured I would try to do both. I hopped on the next bus home, ran the four blocks from the bus stop to my home faster than I've probably ran any distance in years, fired up my computer and emailed the resume off, darted back out the door, hustled the four blocks back to the bus stop, hopped on the next bus to the BART station, and jumped on the next train that would get me headed towards San Francisco.

Just as the train came up on the undersea tunnel, I got a call from the staffing agency dude. Bad news, he says. We were too late in getting your resume over there. They'd just filled the position.
So much for the slam dunk. And I was pretty sure I was going to be late for my interview, as well. Terrific, I'd blown this job interview for nothing.

Actually, miraculously, I walked through the door of the office at 3:58 PM. Definitely not ideal for a job interview to show up two minutes before the scheduled time, but I figured it was better than not showing up at all. I probably also looked a bit disheveled from all the running I'd been doing. Nothing I could do about that at this point.

During the interview, I felt pretty good about things. I somehow forgot about the stress and disappointment I'd been experiencing only moments before, and focused on the interview itself. I think I answered their questions well. I felt warm and sincere and genuine, and I think I did the best that I can expect myself to do in an interview, which is pretty good. I liked the people I interviewed with, and came away from the interview really feeling like I might be a good fit for the company.

On the BART ride home, suddenly all the stress and disappointment I'd somehow managed to put aside during the interview came flooding back to me. I suddenly felt caught up in the grip of tremendous despair. Everything seemed so bleak and hopeless. There was no way I was going to get this job, or any other decent job, ever again. I felt like August Strindberg. I must have been wringing my hands and sighing theatrically or something, because my despair was apparent to a guy standing next to me.

It's okay, it's okay, he said to me. I'm pretty sure he was French.

Yesterday, as I was searching for jobs online, I saw that the company I interviewed with has reposted the position. I guess I didn't get the job. They didn't even contact me to tell me I didn't get the job. That was disappointing.

But it's okay.

I have a job for the moment, one that should, at least, prevent me from starving and becoming homeless, if only barely. And I walk to and from work down gorgeous Berkeley streets on beautiful Berkeley days and it's just not possible for me to despair all the time. And I've made a bit of money selling stuff I wasn't using and don't really need on amazon, and selling one thing I didn't want to part with on craigslist, but I can do without for the moment. It's only for now.

Of course, I'll never know if it was the fact that I showed up a bit dishevelled, only two minutes before 4:00, that cost me my shot at that position. I'm sure it didn't help. But then, the fact that I was fired from a job last year probably didn't help either. It's definitely extra-challenging finding a job in the wake of being fired, trying to convince potential employers that that one failure is not the sum total of who you are, that in fact, if anything, you've learned and grown from that experience. Still, despite this challenge, most of the time I remain hopeful that, in the long run, I might end up with a permanent position that's better than the one I lost. It wasn't a job I especially liked, or that paid much at all. I was just complacent in it, is all.

I'm trying to do more networking these days. So many people I know got their jobs at least in part because they knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone. It's amazing to me how big of a thing networking is, how hugely important it can be. Networking has always been a bit difficult for me, because I'm not the most socially comfortable person in the world and because I have a hard time promoting myself and using people I genuinely like and respect to try to get a leg up. But there are opportunities out there, and I want to give myself the best chance I can of taking advantage of them.

You Have To Burn The Rope

Go play this game, now. It made my day. I think you'll love it, too.

P.S. It's Swedish.

Blogistical Stuff

Mad props to my good friend Aaron--you can follow his adventures and, most importantly, see pictures and videos of his adorable son Ezra, at Two Body Problem--for turning me on to a few nifty new doodads available to blogspot users. My new blogroll now updates when the blogs I read and recommend are updated! Neat-o! And you can now subscribe to this blog using the subscription whatchamacallit located right underneath my Xbox 360 gamercard! Enjoy!

(If you're a blogspot user who's interested in these or other Not Ready for Primetime features, check out draft.blogger.com.)

It's all in the game: NHL 08 edition.

EA should replace that dude they've had aggressively declaring "It's in the game!" in their EA Sports titles for as long as I can remember with The Wire's Omar Little saying "It's all in the game," mainly because, as I mentioned on Tuesday, Omar is awesome, but also because, at least in the case of their latest NHL game, it really seems to be true. At least, I have it on good authority that it's true from a few die-hard hockey fan friends of mine. I understand that the coaching and management aspects of the game are handled really well, and add a lot to the experience for those players who are into that sort of thing. All I really know is that, when you're on the ice, the game is tremendous fun. I've liked many a hockey game over the years, but I don't think I've ever loved a hockey game as much as I love NHL 08.

I'm pretty ill-equipped to review these sorts of annually released sports games, because I'm not a big enough sports fan to know how authentically they capture the sport on which they're based, and because I don't play them each year, so I can't really tell how significant the changes to each new edition are. But who cares about those technical details, anyway? For me, games and sports are primarily about emotion. I've never liked a sport or a team enough to follow it throughout an entire, interminable regular season. But I occasionally get swept up in the intense emotions that can surround a championship series, and I was crushed when the Ducks lost game 7 in their bid for the Stanley Cup in 2003. Just as that series had me screaming at my television like a crazy person, NHL 08 has induced me to take the Lord's name in vain many, many times, not out of frustration with poor design choices or unfair AI, but simply because the game creates in me the exact same investment of emotion that the sport itself has done on occasion.

A big part of the game's success is in the "skill stick" system, which isn't new in this edition but was new to me. This control scheme has you using the right thumbstick to deke and shoot. After years of playing hockey games where shooting was done with the push of a button, it took a bit of adjustment on my part, but ultimately this came to feel far more intuitive, and although it's a relatively small change, it goes a long way in making me feel more connected to the action on the ice.

Although I've never had the attention span to follow a full season of actual hockey, I did play a full season as the Ducks, attempting to help them defend the Cup after their victory last year. Playing through the season on the Pro difficulty, I wound up as the eighth seed in the Western Conference playoffs, and was totally outplayed by the Vancouver Canucks in the first round. Who knows, maybe if I'd bothered with the deeper aspects of the game, the coaching and management stuff, designing plays, trading players, my team would have fared better. But although I'm really glad those aspects are there and are so well done for those players who enjoy them, I'm especially glad that the on-ice action feels so authentic, for people like me, who just want to get swept up in the emotion of that moment when you send the puck home.

NHL 08: Five/Five for fighting

I killed Charlton Heston!

When I was young, I had this idea that our internal monolgues, every thought that runs through our heads, are being printed out in heaven or the alien's command center or wherever. I envisioned this endless room full of dot-matrix printers constantly screeching away, one for every one of us, and imagined that some poor sod has to look over all this stuff. I think this notion may have been a side effect of my Catholic upbringing, something some guilt-ridden part of my psyche devised to try to scare me into only thinking pure thoughts. If so, it failed miserably.

Anyway, yesterday morning, I swear that at one point the thought ran through my head, "It's kinda weird that Charlton Heston is still alive." Then, when I got home from work late last night and glanced at Yahoo!, I found out that this was no longer the case. Whoever's in charge of these things must have seen the printout of my thought and said to himself, "Shit, I knew I was forgetting to do something!"

If I'm supposed to feel bad about this, it's not working either.

It's all in the game.

So here I am, working at a coffee shop again for the time being. I don't mind the work. The people are cool. And this shop is in the heart of Downtown Berkeley, a colorful and fascinating neighborhood, which helps keep things interesting. Stuff is always happening. The other day, a few hundred people marched by the shop, protesting China's occupation of Tibet. That was pretty cool.

But I do mind the low rate of pay, and the low number of hours. To be honest, I'm still a little surprised that I've had as much trouble as I've had finding a job that pays at least a bit better. I've got another interview lined up this Thursday, which I really hope I get. (Agonizing pre-interview decision: Do I spend the money on getting my hair trimmed, for fear that my long hair isn't making the best impression on prospective employers?) I'd feel like a bit of a jerk, jumping ship so soon after taking this job at the coffee shop, accepting another job, but I suppose it's not as if people don't leave these jobs after a brief period all the time, and I suppose it's not as if they deserve my loyalty, considering what they're paying me. As my man Omar on The Wire is fond of saying, "It's all in the game."

"Help my union? For 25 years, we been dying slow down there. Dry docks rustin', piers standin' empty. My friends and their kids like we got the cancer. No lifeline got throwed all that time, nothin' from nobody. And now you want to help us? Help me?" -Frank Sobotka

So, yeah, The Wire. Watched the first, I dunno, six episodes way back when, thought it was boring. Then recently I decided to give it another chance. Somewhere around episode nine, something clicked. I finally acquired the taste for The Wire, I guess. And I just finished the second season, which for me was even more powerful than the first. Frank Sobotka, the union leader who gets caught up in criminal dealings and becomes the focus of the task force's investigation, is one of the more compelling criminals I've ever come across. I really feel for him. The things he does are wrong, and he makes some bad choices, but his personal reasons for doing those things are all basically good. There's been a kind of betrayal of the way of life that he and his fellow dockworkers have essentially been born into. The work dries up. The men no longer have enough money to provide for themselves and their families. And Sobotka does what he does in an attempt to help them, to provide.

It is, as many critics have said, a literary show. In terms of its pacing, its characters, the way it grapples with themes and social issues, the way it holds up a mirror to our society, it feels like a really good book, only one you watch instead of read.

I think Omar's expression resonates with me because I have a tendency to think of things, even extremely important real-life situations, as if they are games. Right now, the big game for me is the money game. Scrounging by on coffee shop pay at 20 hours a week or whatever is going to be extremely challenging, if not impossible. I've made some significant adjustments. I've cancelled my few small monthly charitable donations, to the ACLU and the HRC. I've put my Netflix account on hold, desperate as I am to see The Wire Season Three. My on-again, off-again subscription to World of Warcraft has gone off again, despite the fact that, as getrichslowly.org shows us, we can learn a lot about money from the game. (getrichslowly continues to be a source of encouragement, knowledge and inspiration. J.D. has been through some tough times, and his frankness about his mistakes and struggles, and his subsequent success feels like a source of comfort and support as I struggle with the situation I find myself in.) I'm selling off some stuff on amazon.com. I've even cancelled GameFly for the time being, which, for me, was the hardest decision, because of course I love playing, thinking about and writing about games, and still entertain thoughts of doing it professionally at some point. I'll be taking a break from new games for a little while, but hopefully not for too long. I don't want to miss out on Grand Theft Auto IV.




I'm really excited about this game, not just because the previous games have been astounding from a gameplay perspective, but also because I think this game has tremendous potential in terms of its story. I really think the Grand Theft Auto games have been scathing works of social satire, that they've had something meaningful to say. If The Wire holds up a mirror to our society, the Grand Theft Auto games filter our society through video games and action movies and still wind up with a significant amount of truth, and IV seems poised to follow in that tradition. The fact that the central character is an immigrant from Eastern Europe opens up all kinds of terrific possibilities. Heck, just reading this blurb from the game's information page is enough to get me excited:

What does the American dream mean today?

For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past.

For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they canfind fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity.

As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don't.

Mercifully, I haven't been dragged into a criminal underworld myself. Yeah, times are a bit tough. And I see myself being a bit more callous about some things. Walking to work the other day, a young woman, somewhat younger than me, asked me for money, and I'm certainly in no position to be giving anyone anything. Not that I would have given her anything anyway. But in the past, Iwould have really felt something, this sense of, I don't know, guilt or fear, this "There but for the grace of God go I" punch to the stomach. But now I just felt kind of removed about it. "Sorry," I said, and walked on without a second thought. I've hit a rough patch, and you're on the street. That's how it goes. It's all in the game.

Most of the time, I know things are gonna be okay. Some of the time I'm terrified. Most of the time, I remember that many people have found themselves in tough situations at one point or another. Some of the time, I feel like the biggest failure, the most colossal fuck-up in the whole history of the world.

But I feel alright.



Yeah, I feel alright tonight.

The Wire Season Two: 10/10 stevedore-replacing robots